Traditional Monitoring vs Observability

Developers should learn traditional monitoring when working in legacy or on-premises environments, or when maintaining systems with predictable, stable workloads where historical baselines are effective meets developers should learn observability to effectively manage modern cloud-native and microservices architectures, where systems are dynamic and failures can be unpredictable. Here's our take.

Traditional Monitoring

Nice Pick

Developers should learn traditional monitoring when working in legacy or on-premises environments, or when maintaining systems with predictable, stable workloads where historical baselines are effective

Pros

• It is crucial for ensuring system reliability, compliance with SLAs, and troubleshooting known issues in production environments, such as server crashes or network outages
• Related to: log-management, alerting-systems

Cons

• Specific tradeoffs depend on your use case

Observability

Developers should learn observability to effectively manage modern cloud-native and microservices architectures, where systems are dynamic and failures can be unpredictable

Pros

• It is crucial for troubleshooting production issues, ensuring reliability, and improving user experience in applications with high complexity and scale
• Related to: monitoring, distributed-tracing

Cons

• Specific tradeoffs depend on your use case

The Verdict

These tools serve different purposes. Traditional Monitoring is a methodology while Observability is a concept. We picked Traditional Monitoring based on overall popularity, but your choice depends on what you're building.

The Bottom Line

Traditional Monitoring wins

Based on overall popularity. Traditional Monitoring is more widely used, but Observability excels in its own space.